The APC leader said: "We have also made substantial inroads. We have been welcomed in areas that are not normally our strongholds. I am confident of victory - even if there is a run-off I am going to win".

About 2.6 million voters were eligible to pick a new president and representatives, six years after the end of the Sierra Leone's civil war.

In all, seven political parties fielded candidates in a country ranked the second poorest on earth, despite its huge mineral resources including diamonds.

Legislators are elected by a simple majority, and 566 candidates stood for the 112 seats in the single-chamber parliament.

The elections are only the second since the country emerged from one of the most brutal wars in modern history, and the first poll Sierra Leone has organised after 17,500 UN peacekeepers pulled out of the country in December 2005.

A civil war, fuelled by blood diamonds, ravaged Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2001, claiming 120,000 lives while hundreds of thousands of survivors suffered horrors at the hands of fighters.